I'd hoped to get this blog posted before the news broke, but Techcrunch got the drop on me :-). No matter – its out now so let me be the second to tell you … we just closed a $16M series C funding round led by Institutional Venture Partners. You can read more about the details here tomorrow.

If you happened to catch my opening presentation at Spiceworld Austin you’re probably thinking, “what’s up with that? I thought you guys were going to be profitable next year. If so, why’d you raise the money?” Good questions. We were indeed close to profitability; in fact our original 2010 plan had us putting a tidy sum into the bank at the end of the year.

There was just one problem – we weren’t building new features and capabilities into Spiceworks fast enough. We were making too many trade-offs, pushing out too many features you asked for. And worst of all – too many of the innovative ideas the team had weren’t seeing the light of day. With our user base approaching 1 million IT Pros world wide, I just wasn’t comfortable with the speed at which we were enhancing the platform.

Fortunately, thanks to the support of all of you, Spiceworks has developed quite the high profile in the last year. We were getting lots of calls from top-tier venture firms. Many were interested in this unique model we've built together. But at the end of the day it was an easy choice to go with IVP. They have a great track record of working with some of the industries truly breakout companies such as Twitter, Netflix, MySQL, Business.com, and others. They understand our disruptive model and its billion dollar potential. And most of all – they are patient investors. They’re used to making big, long-term bets. Exactly what we were looking for in a partner.

So there you have it. If you thought we were in good shape before, we’re in awesome shape now. Between IVP, Shasta and Austin Ventures - we now have some very deep pockets behind us as we set off on our quest to Simplify Everything IT and transform how IT Products and services are managed, marketed and sold.

Great news. I'm sure SW will become profitable on their own as well, but it's also good to know that such sceptics as venture companies value SW that much, that means that SW is really going to be around for us for a long time! Congrats and thank you!

Scott commented on our hiring plans in the Austin Statesman. We'll be hiring more developers to build more features (we promise not to inundate you!), more people in sales to drive revenue (and profits), and more in marketing to get the word out there. Should be a fun year!